Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

Getting your site to display at the top of a SERP is quite an accomplishment, but it also takes quite a bit of effort to keep it there. If people click through to your site only to click their back buttons and look for another result, the search engines are going to catch on, and you could fall in the rankings.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us broaden our thinking to satisfy the searchers and keep them from pogo-sticking back to the SERP.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I want to talk to you about the pogo-sticking problem.
So here's the story. Basically search engines, Google included, use a lot of different kinds of data for their ranking algorithms, but one of the pieces that's in there, we don't know exactly how big it might be, but it's certainly possible that it's sizeable, is what's called pogo sticking. They measure this feature or this occurrence where someone performs a search. I performed a search here for IT consultants, and there are a few listings that come up. I click on "IT Boston." It takes me to IT Boston's website, and then I decide, maybe in the first five or ten seconds, "You know what? This site is not solving my problem. This isn't really what I wanted," and I go right back to the same search result.
Either I click back or I search for it again or I search for something different, and then I go and click on other results. Maybe I click on this "Is IT Consulting Dead?" It's sort of a link bait article from some news source, BuzzFeed maybe, click on that, go to that page, and I stay on it and I don't come back to the search result.
Google measures these kinds of things. So does Bing. They measure this pogo-sticking, and they come up with essentially, this is a very simplistic representation of what actually happens, but X% of people pogo stick away from IT Boston in their first 5 seconds of visiting the site, Y% do it for this BuzzFeed page, and Z% do it for IT 101. We're going to calculate some average, the average pogo-sticking as sorted and weighted by the ranking position for this particular search result.
Here's the problem. For every search result, there's some different pogo-sticking rate. But great pages and sites tend to have the trait that they've got really low pogo-sticking rates. If IT Boston is a great result, people click it and they stay. Their search query has been satisfied. Google likes that. That means that a searcher is made happy, and they're not coming back and doing other searches and clicking other results. Sometimes this might be okay. Maybe there are some sorts of searches where Google says, "Oh, lots of people do click multiple times, and lots of people do bounce back and forth and it's fine." But for the vast majority of searches this is really important to get right. So I have some tactical tips for you.
If you've got a pogo-sticking problem, a high bounce rate, people are going back to the search results, clicking on your competitors' links, that kind of thing, the number one thing you can do is get in the searcher's head. This is different, might be different from getting in your customer's head. You might say, "Hey, we've designed this excellent landing page. It's really focused. If the 10% of people who search, who are our kind of customers, come to this page, they're going to convert."
The challenge there is you've got to think bigger. You have to think about all the searchers, the 90% of the searchers who may not be your customer and how do you answer their query, because otherwise you're probably going to be falling in those search results. What questions do those people have? What makes them engage versus leave? What is it, when this person performs a search, that they want to know? And if you don't know, you can ask.
One of my top recommendations for people who have just kind of a crummy page is, "I want you to go out and survey people in your office, people who work with you, people who are long-time customers, people who are in your network. I want you to survey them, and I want you to ask them, 'Imagine you have performed a search for X. Tell me the first, most important thing you're looking for. Now tell me the second thing that you'd probably be interested in, and now tell me the third thing.' " People will just free-form leave a couple phrases or sentences in those boxes, send it back to you. Boom. Now you know what people want. If you don't have that sort of searcher empathy built into your head already, you can do it this way, through the surveying system, and then you can make a page that people are going to love. You can answer those questions.
Number two, I see a lot of search results out there that are missing design and UX elements that are critical to success. If you've got this crappy, crummy 1990s design aesthetic going on or even a more updated thing, but it's just not a very usable website, the navigation's poor, the images are poor, the content quality is poor, you've got to work on that. If you can't say with conviction that you have the highest quality, most usable, beautiful, high visual-quality page in the results, get to work man. Get to work. This stuff is really important.
If you're looking, by the way, one of my top suggestions is to check out Dribbble.com. That's D-r-i-b-b-b-l-e.com. Wonderful designers are available on there. Some of them are very expensive. Some of them are less expensive. Great resource to check out.
Number three, the last thing I'll mention on tactical tips for this is load speed and device support. A lot of times I do see this problem where someone goes to a page and then after two or three seconds if something hasn't loaded, they go back. You can work on this. Even if you have a relatively robust page, you can get elements to load in those critical first second, second and a half time frames. Check out developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed. They've got an analysis tool and a system you can walk through to make sure that that works.
You should also be multi-device compliant. Make sure that if you don't have responsive design, you at least have a mobile-friendly site, an iPad-friendly site. I do love responsive design. I recommend it. But this becomes a challenge too, because remember, if lots of people are searching on mobile and they're bouncing back because your page is slow or it doesn't work with a mobile device, you're in trouble. Those stats are going to hurt you in the results.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.

I also like the drunk user analogy. Website visitors aren't idiots, they're merely impaired by their lack of focus, lack of time, lack of caring, etc. Someone once recommended a usability book to me called "Don't Make Me Think" but I was too busy to think about it, let alone buy and read it. :-)

The best free resources I've seen online regarding usability come from Jakob Nielsen. His group has done a ton of usability testing and research, both on websites and mobile interfaces.

I spend around 30 min per day on a high traffic page which we constantly develop based on user feed-back. Now we actually rank higher than Wikipedia for some of the most important terms! While it is a page which from the beginning really helps users solve a problem, I believe that it is also due to continuous investment in making it even better over time

Yes Rand. This is a big issue with most website owners. They often said "oh I don't need this or that. I've done some SEO last year so I'm done with optimizing my design or whatever it's about". So europeandomaincentre is right regarding continuous investment and I gave him my tumb up.

... and Rand. Thanks for the great post. Awesome Whiteboard Friday video. Nice weekend to anyone.

Yet so many website's do not begin with the target visitor needs in mind (high pogo-sticking).

In my opinion, 'Search empathy' and 'persona targeting' are indeed two of the same thing and facilitate the need to deploy multiple online marketing disciplines over multiple-platforms to convert target visitors.

Loved the statement "get in the searchers head, but it might be different inside a customers head" - hence the need to understand how target personas 'think'.

This is why comprehensive keyword phrase targeting (once target personas have been researched) is so critical to overall website / page success. And why stone-age website design mentality that focuses solely on 'design' and not 'storytelling with a colourful message' still hurts businesses who are none-the-wiser.

In fact, without page focus consideration (persona and keyword targeting) I'd say budget spent on 'content' would be a complete waste of time and money.

A sector that so often get's this wrong is local small businesses. We've all seen sites that have a 'services' page that lists 8 x different services. Far better to have a relevant, focused page per service (where a searcher stays) than a page showing 8 than confuses the visitor (where a searcher goes). Plus 8 x virtual sales people are better than 1!

In the future, with semantic search and Google's knowledge graph connecting sites that are subject-matter authoritative, reducing pogo-stick hopping will become even more of an indication of the time / effort investment a webmaster had made in providing excellent content for his online target customer.

So this WBF ties-up everything about online success, UX and relevancy superbly :)

Thanks Tony - thrilled to hear you liked it so much! I'd agree that personas can be an important part of this. Where I worry is when marketers construct personas around their target customers, who may be very different than personas constructed around searchers (which are often a broader group seeking different kinds of information). Google & Bing are focused on searcher happiness, not necessarily customer conversion, so there can be a disconnect between the two if marketers don't specifically think about empathy for the searcher

I was contacted by a client who was bemoaning the fact that his website wasn't ranking higher on Google. In fact it was ranking around 5-6th position for many competitive terms. When I asked him why he wanted it higher he said that it was because he just wasn't selling enough products.

When I went to look at the website it was immediately obvious what the real problem was. It looked worse than a mid '90s MySpace page with huge blocks of tiny text, low resolution images with squished aspect ratios and breaking every usability convention out there. Doing SEO on a website like this is like trying to fix a leaky bucket by pouring in more water .

Some clients seriously need to have their head banged against a brick wall.

On the plus side, when I see sites like that doing well enough to still make money/conversions, I always think "wow, they have such an amazing opportunity." It's the sites that are beautiful, amazing creations that are barely paying the bills that I worry about.

Agree, if that many obvious issue exist and they still have a page 1 ranking I see that as low hanging fruit. They clearly have a very old and trusted link profile/social profile and thusly when the on page is corrected and the site is segmented correctly into topics and pages,organized better with content on key convertible terms they see undeniable improvements. I always loved giving those client their reports the first 2-3 months when it is obvious.

I'm glad you make the clear distinction Rand between 'pogo-sticking' and bounce rate as to often people get hung up on bounce rate when a bounced visit isn't necessarily an indication of poor user experience. For example, people visiting a blog may only view one page before bouncing away - that doesn't mean the searcher's enquiry hasn't been satisfied.

User experience is what it all about. It generally doesn't matter how good your content is if the user's first impression of a page is not a good one. Design and navigation is often a sadly overlooked part of many sites.

Is the pogo stick one of the ranking factors? because if it is then that is why I have experienced significant drops in rankings that ranked initially. The downside of dealing with a client who does not want their content and pages to be aligned with the usability guidelines,visitors are always going to bounce without even blinking.

Certainly seems to hold some significance. As Rand says: "Basically search engines, Google included, use a lot of different kinds of data for their ranking algorithms, but one of the pieces that's in there ... is what's called pogo sticking."

When I see things like this my (and your) first question should be "Where did Rand hear that". I don't doubt someone of his stature in our field has the sources and knows good information when he gets it, but some that that is not factual is not factual, "most likely" true isn't true. Again, I consider Rand one of the leading authorities on our field, but "I heard from a guy" syndrome is the biggest challenge of SEO. I see the logic of tracking this for Google, and this sort of engagement as a tool for rank 'smacks' of Google's strategies for sure. All that said, rank or not the ideas and advice is good from a conversion standpoint and is still worth utilizing for that.

From what we've heard, the engines may use it directly in considering ranking changes, but it also may be used as an element of a more subtle/sophisticated algorithm around user satisfaction and SERPs effectiveness. Either way, the importance of optimizing this feature can't be overstated - bounces suck, even if they don't mean you'll immediately rank lower.

There was a google hangout some time ago when someone from google confirmed that pogo sticking is a factor but only on an aggregate level - not on a page/site level. Basically it's done based on queries and it's the only "bouce rate" that google cares about :)

Overall all the points stated in the WBF are great and should be tackled anyway without having the "solving the pogo sticking issue" in mind :)

There was a google hangout some time ago when someone from google confirmed that pogo sticking is a factor but only on an aggregate level - not on a page/site level. Basically it's done based on queries and it's the only "bounce rate" that google cares about :)

Overall all the points stated in the WBF are great and should be tackled anyway without having the "solving the pogo sticking issue" in mind :)

Great topic for WBF! It's a compelling reason to include design aspects in an SEO strategy.

When the engines are evaluating pogo-sticking, do they take into account how long a searcher spends on a site before returning to the SERP? In the the video, you mention users that navigate away in the first few seconds, but do they also consider users that navigate away after that? E.g., A user clicks on a result, it seems useful (there's nothing wrong design-wise), but after reading it for a bit, they decide it's not what they're looking for and return to the SERP, maybe a minute or so later.

It's hard to say. There's almost certainly algorithmic elements that are structured to include the complexities of dwell time and the averages for all the pages in the result set and probably other factors, too. If you're seeing that folks aren't "satisfied" with your page, I'd do whatever you can to fix it. Even if it doesn't directly affect rankings, it will impact branding, user satisfaction, browse rate (as they click more pages on your site), and conversions.

I always love to listen to WBF posts even when they might seem to someone as the obvious things. These are exactly the things I discussed with my client at our last meeting and therefore hearing it from Rand assures me I'm going in the right direction.

I know some clients who intentionally created pages on their websites targeting a specific keyword and have done as far as on-site optimization is concerned everything so they would rank higher and they actually did. However these are pages that only search engines might find interesting and not the actual people. I fought really hard to get my point across to the client who did not understand why people who come to the page tend to leave it. Another thing was the outdated design on which we agreed to make some improvements in the following month. Nevertheless, even though you pointed out in one of your previous WBF posts, we have to find a way to convey the message in non-insulting way saying: "You're baby's just ugly." :) Some are just not willing to admit that there could be something wrong with the site itself and if that's the case, we really have a problem.

If I put myself in the shoes of someone who's searching for something, despite of finding what I've looked for, I always tend to look at other pages too and after scheming all the ones that caught my eye I decide to get back to the one I preferred the most. But as Kingof5 and you wrote in one of the comments above, it's really not common nowadays not to open different sites in new tabs on your computer.

Thanks again for sharing. Hopefully our clients will find our improvement suggestions as something which is worth taking into consideration and not as criticizing their work and efforts.

Great post with some really great concepts in it (I enjoyed the survey concept too!) in your examples you mentioned searching for "IT consultants" from this result the user would follow up by searching for "is IT Consulting Dead".

My question being: these are (or could be) broad questions how would you keep the user on your site from this bounce, would it be implementing a blog / new feed system if you are finding that a number of users are following a similar path? Obviously I could foresee this to be a challenge of keeping a landing page clean and user friendly verses cluttering it with news feeds etc.

I always find is you can’t please everyone so is there a point when you just have to say whilst I am getting a “pogo effect” the people who are staying on my site are the kind of people I want on my site and its working for me.

Pogo-Stick Problem is one of the critical issue for the website, if we are not receiving right type of customer back through the search queries, might be problem. we have to focus on points as Rand explained above. Thanks for your another edition of white board Friday.

I've found the most efficient way to reduce pogo-sticking is to actually add highly relevant external links to the bottom of pages like Wikipedia does. I figure if they're going to leave anyway, it's best that they go out that way instead of using the back button. That way my users are happy and Google has no idea they bounced.

In order to reduce the bounce rate and stopping people from going back and search for similar thing and click on some other results, one need to work on everything simple thing in the website that can be seen and judge within 5 to 10 seconds.

In my opinion, good design and color scheme, title of the website, Heading tag, friendly and attractive image that attract targeted audience plus a content that actually help user instead of gaming or asking them to subscribe and all other shit!

I think in order to reduce your pogo stick %age, One need to work on how and what users wants to see on their website plus UI and UX. I also like the idea of having a mobile friendly website as this will really help your reduce the bounce rate!

Yep, that is a great tip that worked well for me when I operated a brick-n-mortar landscape business. We did a survey that asked: "What are the words that you would use to search for a business like (name of your company)"

The results we got back were enlightening. We learned that NONE of the phrases we were optimizing for were in their vocabulary. SEO got a lot easier after that!

as a great source of services for online business owners. So for example - when the article is about growing your follower base you would comment briefly on the article and mention that you use http://TwipQuick.com to grow your following for your business. Or for example: "I agree that it is hard to grow your social media following, but I have had much success using in the past"

@Rand - I have one question related to pogo stick. Will the same thing apply for the internal pages of my website? For Instance: if someone clicks on one of the internal pages in my website and then within a fraction of a second he clicks on the back button, will the weightage of that particular page reduce?

Another great WBF! I've been trying to get people to understand that you shouldn't JUST be thinking about your website from your customers point of view, clients tend to only want content that will appeal to their customers and convert to new business. Especially if you have a blog, currently I'm only focussing on my searchers, to ensure return visitors on a regular basis. Getting this right will inevitably mean that the pagerank will rise and indirectly this will increase awareness of your business, sales, lead generation. Thanks for another great piece and some new lingo (pogo-sticking) Rand!

it all comes to a new kind of inbound marketing. all about flipping the funnel and treating the visitors you do have with respect. I like to use "taking someone to a first date" analogy. the goal is to wow the visitors so he may go with you to a second date. keep your users very happy and impressed and new ones will come. create amazing expiriences and let your users work for you and they will.

I, like most other searchers, tend to search and open new tabs for most relevant 10 listings on the first, second and third page before going through and reading all of them. Does a page that's opened in a tab but is not your main window still receive the same session time as the current page you're viewing?

This is funny, I just watched today's Whiteboard Friday which was perfect example of assuming people know what you are saying and letting them ask questions if they don't. I have known about the pogo-sticking concept before it had a name and completely understand. Now I know what it is called :-) Thx!

Intent based on the page they are currently on and what it likely ranked for when they found it. Id think a real estate site with a section for waterfront homes should have images of water and homes, not just a nice picture of a house. An amazing ranch house on 10 acres isn't going to snap the attention of their eyes when the SERP they found you with was Miami Waterfront. If you predict how they are likeliest to arrive you can predict their goal and plan accordingly. Our keyword research should always follow with setting out beartraps once we get them to come in.

I would really like to know how multiple tabs are evaluated in regards to pogo-sticking. When I do research, quite often I open all the links that look like they might be useful on the first 2-3 pages. As I work my way through the results, some will be closed immediately, after I finally get there, and others will stay open until I've finished writing about the topic. Some will result in followed links from the page. Perhaps this behavior is too far from usual to be calculated, but I can't be the only person who searches this way. Thoughts?

Nice, as a complete SEO beginner I was still on the hunt to get a clue on the impact of the bounce rate. I added it to my +100 article library :)

Maybe it is a good idea to find possible improvements by looking at the bounce-rate per keyword group (categorized by either by theme or intent, such as informative/transaction/problem solving orientated queries). I think this could give you clues on why users 'pogo'. This information I suppose could then be used to identify which pages can be improved in which way, or which new pages are to be created. This may also help the already existing pages by diverting traffic to more appropiate pages.

You can get such an overview in Google Analytics (only if you have the Webmaster tools linked to it I think...).

Great topic rand it really shows how the job of a seo has become so much harder. Landing page optimization and user experience open a whole new world to the seo industry. The challenge & opportunity i see is most seo's need to learn a whole new field and clients need to start paying for things that aren't as ranking tangible as links and meta changes once where.

I'll will be sharing this video with our clients. They always ask us why we push good content, a great design, great graphics and especially responsive design. BTW when are you going to get this site into responsive?

I usually have 10-15 websites tabbed when i start chrome - thats why i will not open all sites. I need to get interested by title and descreption - better the SERP look - it's not allways title and description...

I even dont know much people wich open all sites.. I normally used the Google preview - but its stopped know - thats lame :( I allways used it

Another great insight into how to solve the bounce rate issues. I think the first few seconds are crucial when a user visits a site. The look and feel of the page are important factors. I imagine the visitor thinking, "does this website convey the correct message, to make me spend more time here?".

Its always a great pleasure to read WBF. Its an effective post. Your valuable and practical efforts are always help us to minimize our issues. Even i have faced the situation because one of my website was not Responsive and it suffered then i realized how badly we need the theme which support all the devices. Great work once again...

Nice tip on the office survey. I love it when brands use responsive design, it just tells me they know what they are doing, I've come across too many where you cannot read the content on mobile as it's all over the place.

Just some more resources to add - .Behance is a great one, a lot like Dribble and so is People Per Hour for Graphic Designers, which is relativity priced.

Not only Brands need responsive theme, now days responsive theme has become one of the essential part of your internet marketing campaign.There are different different devices to use internet and they all have different resolution. You website must be responsive either you are a brand or a small scale business firm. If you don't have effective design (technically) then it might harm your business.

Really interesting video Rand, i love your description of the searcher being satisfied.

In terms of content would you generally recommend that all content should have an element of landing page within it? Obviously some content is designed for click-through, which relies more heavily on UX, but would you advise that content (blogs, infographics even social?) require a landing page factor be it voice/style/imagery etc.?

A great and future-centric WBF. If the Pogo-Stick is not a higher value in the Algorithm at present, it'll be in the near future. A good marketer sees the future very well. This post reminds me the 16th Aug. WBF where the major concern was hidden in the Empathy (here the searchers empathy) and then the UX.

I dont think google does that on a site by site basis, but it uses these metrics on a serp by serp basis. Which means there isnt really a pogo stick rank attached to your site, but rather to a whole serp. This way google may learn that when people search for cars they want automobiles, but also expect the band "cars" (which i just made up). At least thats what they say ;)

Great post Rand! I think this is a great way to look at your website in terms of optimizing it. We are unfortunately one of those companies stuck with the 90's looking site currently (http://www.plasticprinters.com). We've bent and twisted as much as we can to get it to look decent but the hard reality of a redesign is definitely in the near future. With thousands of pages of content though it's no fun thought. ; P

Looks like an effort was made to make it responsive after the fact. Other than being a little bit crowded aesthetically, I have seen much worse walk through my door. As for the thousands of pages, I hope they were all dynamic pages via a database. If you have URL's built from a database then you can usually sum them easily into MOD rewrite rules. When you have no URL naming convention consistent across the site MOD rewriting after a redesign can get ugly.

Thanks for the quickie WBF today. Especially loved the distinction you made between a searcher and a customer. These are two very different people. I will definitely use the idea of having other staff review important landing pages for feedback. Keep it up, chief mozzer!

More and more the issue of responsive design and, to be frank, good design is cropping up. Genuinely this week I am putting together a report for a client who does not have responsive e-commerce site and they have 400 visitors per month only spending 4 seconds each because of a design flaw...that's a lot of potential sales lost even at 5-10% conversion rate.

With Google talking about websites people 'want to use' the focus has to come back to design, UX, usability and device adaptation. The challenge is walking people through the issues and then, in our case, often redesigning or restructuring the foundations to give it the right foundation for the future. Majorly important.

I used to get many white friday emails in my box... used to read the topic and leave them since I always got the idea what you going to talking about.. but this time it was different.. with pogo-stick problem... and Glad to use my time to watch your video. & I LOVE & Agreed with your thoughts. Its gonna help me with my other projects!!

If the design and development is not done with the consultation of an EXPERT SEO, it'll (definitely) going to be tweaked or tuned to satisfy the need. IMO a good designer should understand the main basics of SEO.

I have to meet the first designer yet that understands SEO.....unfortunately SEO comes after design most times and then they do not want to change anything because it is the most beautiful design they have ever made and the client loves the design....As a SEO you will have 2 to convince that you have a better solution, which costs money to change the design

Nice Topic; When I read the title "Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem" I thought this is going to be something new. Cause I wasn't aware of what pogo-stick is. Now everything is clear about this Pogo-Stick. :)

I have a question for you the PR of seomoz.org was 6 or 7 may be. But now PR of the new domain moz.com is 2. (Don't know the reason why is this happen even after redirection.) Can you explain it? Or may be a White Board Friday on it would be great. :)

Searcher empathy is one of the biggest things I am trying to explain to my clients. I like to explain it as if you have not hit searchers in the face with a bat that tells them what your site does and why it is important, you are not going to rank well or convert well.

Great WBF. However, we believe Google might be putting too much weight on pogo-sticking (in certain niches) based on what we've been seeing. Once the pogo-sticking factor was introduced into their Algo it opened the door for Scraper sites to dominate the search results for certain terms that are popular with pirated content (i.e. MP3's, Software, Images, etc.)

Especially in the MP3 niche where a user might spend 30 seconds to 4+ minutes on the page to listen to a song before they bounce back to another search result.

Also, many of those sites are filled with affiliate links that "trick" the user into clicking to get the content they were searching for. Then a new window pops up (usually from a legit company with legit content) so the user is more likely to search on the new website for the content they are looking for, but the spammy affiliate site gets all the credit from Google for fulfilling the search result.

Shawn, I'd keep pressing forward with good content and build your model around that rather than letting the b*stards get ya down! If you have a good site you may get less first impressions but those people are going to tell friends and your efforts will multiply...